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Continuing to explore the claims made by Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. in regard to the acquisition of Feugo, here we look at whether BEA now has a unified SOA-based platform.

What does unified mean in the age of SOA? Predictably, Annrai O'Toole, CEO of CapeClear, a competitor SOA platform, stated in his blog BEA's Strategery, that “the success of SOA is dependant on open standards” and the acquisition of proprietary software doesn’t contribute to a unified platform.

While I agree 100% that open standards have finally lowered the risk barriers of moving toward SOA, although it has been considered a best practice for software architecture for over 25 years, I’m also a pragmatist. Standards alone don’t solve all problems. In building the SOA, it’s important to decide what needs to be standard, and what can be proprietary.

Interfaces need to be standardized. This is what lowers risk to adoption. No more CORBA vs. COM/DCOM/.net decisions to make. Web services solved that dilemma and made SOA the “new” hot buzz word. But the value of SOA implemented on an integration infrastructure, is that it shouldn’t matter what is behind the interface. It can be a legacy system, an ERP, a home grown proprietary system. That enables an evolutionary approach to SOA. Not all the services are going to be Web services on day one. But there’s also a difference between standard and unified, right?

What does unified mean? For one thing, how many installs are required? How well are the components of the toolset integrated? How many development interfaces are you going to have to learn? In the case of a truly unified platform the ideal answer should be one. That is not yet the case with the BEA “unified” platform. So what is unified?

Fuego already runs on WebLogic, as well as the new BEA ESB. So there is runtime integration. Development integration is a whole other matter. Think it’s going to take some time before WebLogic programmers can seamlessly model the orchestration of a composite application from the development environment. Development integration impacts learning curves, ease of use, and development speed. Bottom line is that all the parts of the BEA platform will actually work together. But they are not yet truly unified. Sun is in the same position with its integration of SeeBeyond. I would call both these platforms more integrated than unified. IBM, on the other hand, has unified its platform. Modeler v.6 runs in Eclipse 3.01 and is fully available from the development platform.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. That’s part of the examination of Chung’s claim that BEA has the ONLY unified SOA platform. Stay tuned, because, as you’ve probably guessed, the competition is stacking up.

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